Robot dogs will soon roam the Pittsburgh International Airport to check for cleanliness and air quality, with the possibility of being used for security in the future.
Skild AI, a Pittsburgh-based startup building a universal “robot brain”, showed off its quadrupedal bot at Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT) on Tuesday. The demo kicked off a six-month pilot project where Skild will deploy four robot dogs to patrol PIT, monitoring air quality and reporting spills or overflowing trash cans to airport staff.
“Deployments themselves are the best future because you get to go into a real place with real people and see how the robot behaves and how the people behave,” Robert Belle-Isle, a robotics team member at Skild, said before the demo. “That teaches you so much more, so much faster.”
If all goes well, the bots could eventually do more than just keep an eye on things. The airport is exploring additional use cases for Skild’s tech, according to PIT’s CIO Deepak Nayyar, including autonomous food delivery and security.
A Skild team member will be on site during the pilot to monitor the robots, plus there’s a slew of safety features, according to Belle-Isle. If a traveler blocks any of the sensors — either on the top, bottom or front of the quadruped — it will stop moving.
“It’s able to socially navigate around people and it’s built with a vast majority of safety features,” Belle-Isle said. “It’s going to be very, very robust to a lot of the complex things that are happening here.”
Baggage bots, automated cleaning and food waste tech
Skild’s pilot is part of the xBridge program, an Allegheny County Airport Authority initiative to partner with startups to develop and test new tech at PIT.
The airport also announced a three-month xBridge pilot with Texas-based startup Arrow Analytics on Tuesday. In partnership with Southwest Airlines, Arrow will test its baggage tracking tech to provide real-time estimates of baggage volume and overhead space starting this year.
Since 2020, the xBridge program has helped test about 35 new technologies. Pilots with local companies include Journey Robotics’ automated baggage handling robot and Ecotone Renewables’ food waste to fertilizer system.
Other xBridge projects have even become permanent staples at the airport. Wait time tracking at security started as an effort with CMU spinout Zensors. Travelers may also be familiar with Carnegie Robotics’ autonomous floor scrubbers, which have been roaming the airport since COVID, as another xBridge success story.
The airport is currently exploring a possible partnership with Gecko Robotics to clean the terminal’s large windows using the startup’s autonomous tech, PIT CIO Nayyar told Technical.ly.
“We know that Pittsburgh is all about being a leader in innovative technologies, robotics and AI,” Nayyar said, “and we share that mindset at the Pittsburgh International Airport.”
